Where software engineering meets GIS.

In creating the OpenDataPhilly website, we knew we needed to pay extra attention to the usability and features available on the search page. After all, what use is a data catalog if you can’t rely on the search results? While designing the page, we decided we wanted to include several ways to sort and filter results along with the standard text search. I’d used directeur’s django_sorting module before, and was highly impressed at how well it integrated with other info already in search parameters, so I decided to use it again. The only thing keeping me from seamlessly dropping in this module was our desire to use images instead of words for the “click on this to sort” link. Django_sorting was built with table headers in mind; so much so that the examples are all about table header tags with a link inside them. We had a slightly different implementation in mind.

The first hurdle that you might think of would be to not require a table structure. Thankfully, django_sorting doesn’t care how you display the data, it only cares about the fields you want to sort on. You can put the sorting links anywhere and it just works. So far, so good.

The second possible hurdle here is that the anchor template tag specification calls for two parameters: the field to sort on, and a string for the link. Since we didn’t want a text link, we really didn’t care about the second parameter. To my surprise, neither did django_sorting! So our anchor template tags look something like this:

<li id="sort_rating_score">{% anchor rating_score %}</li>

This winds up creating a link that still has something for the title attribute and for the inner text:

So our template tag is nice and clean, but we still have to deal with some text in the link. Using either straight-up javascript, or some smaller and nicer jQuery, removing the innerHTML is easy so long as the dom can uniquely identify our sort links. I just gave the link’s parent container an id and cleared the innerHTML of each link. At the same time, I added a class and some css to define the image and size.

So now we have a django_sorting anchor with an image instead of the default text link. All done, right? Not quite. We didn’t just want to use an image here, we wanted some mouseover and focus sprite action, too. Another chuck of jQuery, and a querystring plugin, helps us out again: